Been looking for this book for quite a while now. As with Hidden Connections, I found it at a used bookstore today.

I first encountered the wiki way on Wikipedia.org, where anyone--even me--can edit and add articles. I started a few stubs, enjoyed watching them evolve, even when my precious writing was updated. Almost always, the evolution of the articles made them better. Of course there comes a point of diminishing returns.

So I played with installing various wikis, including Wikimedia (wikipedia's engine) and PmWiki, the PHP script running this wiki. Wikimedia was a monster. Huge resource hog, database driven. PmWiki was relatively resource light, no database, flat file, which at first I disliked, but as I read the developer's reasons for choosing flat file, I bought into the idea. In fact, I've become very enthusiastic, in large part because updates are a breeze. I have a Drupal blog that is MySQL driven, and version updates are a nightmare--mostly because of the damn database.

So PmWiki, with it's flat file system, has served me very well. I've used it for work on a number of documentation projects. I use on this online notebook.

It's not a perfect tool, but it's perfect enough that I use it every day.

I love the wiki philosophy, the egalitarian approach, the never ending updates, the preservation of version history. However, on a practical level, wikis are easy to sabotage, which is why I haven't yet given over editing rights to Perpetual Draft. Anonymous users can only leave comments. Also, this site is really intended as MY online notebook. Still, it would be fun to have others adding to my stuff.